Record Low Set in Deaths From Traffic, but Cyclist deaths rise

Posted on Jan 27, 2012 11:51am PST

Record Low Set in Deaths From Traffic, Mayor Says

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and KATE TAYLOR NY Times

Published: December 29, 2011

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that the number of traffic deaths
fell this year to the lowest level in a century. It is the second time
in two years that a record has been set for fewest fatalities on the streets.

“Nearly 300 New Yorkers are alive today who would not have been if
we had simply sustained the fatality rate of five years ago,” said
Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, who has re-engineered
streets with pedestrian plazas, bicycle lanes and timer-equipped crosswalk
signals in an effort to curtail injuries and deaths on the city’s roads.

“These numbers are not the finish line; they’re really just
mile markers for us,” Ms. Sadik-Khan added. “We have much
more to do.”

Mr. Bloomberg noted that bicycle ridership has grown significantly in recent
years as the city has installed hundreds of miles of bike lanes, a trend
that he said had resulted in a drop in the per-capita death rate for cyclists.

The city plans to introduce a large-scale public bike-sharing program this
spring, prompting some concerns about the influx of 10,000 low-gear bicycles
onto the streets. The Transportation Department has said it is confident
that safety will not be a problem.

But over all, it seems that daily acts of derring-do — moving about
the snarling, breakneck streets of the city — now require a bit
less daring.

In 1970, for instance, near the height of the automobile’s urban
reign, the city recorded 944 traffic fatalities. Even that grim figure
paled in comparison with the 1,360 deaths recorded in 1929, a dark superlative
not since matched.

Back in 1910, when horse-drawn wagons and streetcars still roamed the avenues
(and the year that the city began keeping these records), 332 people were
killed in traffic accidents. The toll was high enough to raise the public’s
ire: in 1913, a worried headline in The New York Times announced that
the region’s “Automobile Death Harvest Doubled in Three Years,”
although it noted that wagon- and trolley-related fatalities had started
to taper off.

Ms. Sadik-Khan created several public-awareness campaigns this year intended
to educate drivers about the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit on city streets,
including a board that displays an L.E.D. skeleton when it detects a car
moving faster than the limit.

The city also installed 1,100 countdown signals at pedestrian crosswalks,
many at notoriously dangerous intersections on roads like Delancey Street
in Manhattan and Queens Boulevard. And it posted a selection of artistic
traffic-safety signs that included haiku.

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said Thursday that the Police
Department had issued more than one million summonses to drivers involved
in unsafe practices. That included 164,000 for not wearing a seat belt;
161,000 for chatting or texting on a hand-held device while driving; and
127,000 for driving through a stop sign.

About 8,500 arrests were made this year for driving while intoxicated,
and the city confiscated 900 cars from violators.

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